Awakening

Fu Qinghai was dreaming.

A long, boundless dream.

Sometimes he felt like a fish, breathing oxygen in the water and swimming freely through the deep sea.

As he swam, he would think, So this is what it feels like to breathe underwater.

Sometimes he felt like a bird soaring through the sky—a petrel from one of his middle-school textbooks.

The lesson he'd memorized as a child appeared hazily in his dream. He became a petrel, flying through a storm.

Howling winds, torrential rain, towering waves, flashes of lightning and peals of thunder...

"Crack!" A bolt of lightning pierced the clouds and struck him.

Damn, that fucking hurt!

Fu Qinghai felt like the lightning was about to numb him. One moment it struck his chest, the next his stomach, then his back.

Was this the price of being a scumbag?

Suddenly, he felt a cool breeze on the top of his head, and his mind seemed to open up...

But most of the time, his dreams were muddled and indistinct.

Until...

[You have successfully been transformed into a Space Marine of the White Scars Legion, reaching a stage milestone!]

[Calculating Assimilation Points... 781 points]

The cold voice in his mind pierced through the muddled dream and reached Fu Qinghai's consciousness.

He woke in an instant.

Fu Qinghai's eyes snapped open. Before him was a churning expanse of murky, yellow-green liquid, and beyond it, a transparent glass cover.

He realized he was breathing naturally in the liquid. With each breath, it flowed into his lungs and through his mouth, nose, and throat.

He moved his hands and feet. They felt unfamiliar, and he was held in place, but for some reason, he had the feeling that a slight tug would set him free.

Still, Fu Qinghai didn't move recklessly. He lay in the glass tank and calmly surveyed his surroundings.

At the same moment, the red alarm light outside the low-temperature incubation pod suddenly lit up, beeping.

Master Kunto, who had been bent over his workbench, abruptly looked up.

"Hm? He's awake early." His mechanical eye flickered. "Half a month ahead of schedule."

He headed for the incubation room.

Through the murky incubation fluid, Fu Qinghai saw what seemed to be a figure moving outside. Just as he prepared to focus on it, the pod shuddered, and the liquid surrounding him began to drain away.

"Hiss—clack!"

Once the fluid had drained, the glass door opened.

Fu Qinghai saw the old face beneath Master Kunto's dark-red hood, along with his eerie green mechanical eye.

Fu Qinghai's voice came out thick and sticky. "Master..."

"Come out. Carefully now—don't fall, and don't overexert yourself." The familiar, raspy voice.

Fu Qinghai did his best to control his unfamiliar limbs, carefully standing up inside the incubation pod before climbing out.

A little viscous, transparent liquid still clung to his skin.

He was completely naked, but when he looked down, he saw that his body hair had grown back.

He meant his leg hair.

Fu Qinghai had barely steadied himself when he glanced down and noticed something was off.

Master Kunto, who used to be short enough to reach only his shoulder, now seemed even shorter. He came only up to Fu Qinghai's upper abdomen.

Fu Qinghai's brain, still waterlogged from the incubation fluid, struggled to turn the thought over.

Did I... get taller?

"Come with me." Before Fu Qinghai could ask, Master Kunto turned and walked away.

Completely naked, Fu Qinghai followed him unsteadily to the workbench.

"Sit." Kunto pointed to a metal box nearby.

Fu Qinghai did as he was told.

From beneath his robe, the Tech-priest's mechanical hand deftly picked up several metal tubes from the workbench and pressed the probes at their ends to Fu Qinghai's head, chest, and back.

Sitting on the metal box, Fu Qinghai adjusted his breathing slightly, getting used to his new body.

His hearing seemed sharper, and his eyesight had improved too. He could clearly make out the dark corners beyond the reach of the workbench's surgical lamps just by focusing on them.

Then he sensed something else was wrong. Fu Qinghai held his breath and listened closely... He could hear his own heartbeat in his chest... and something about it seemed off.

A heart murmur? No, not a murmur... It had to be... it was...

"Excellent. Both hearts are beating normally, and there's no organ necrosis." Master Kunto's voice sounded beside him.

As he spoke, the Tech-priest picked up a small scalpel from the table and made a deep cut across Fu Qinghai's chest.

Blood welled up at once. But beneath the skin, instead of a layer of red muscle, there was a mass of black, armor-like material.

Only a tiny amount of blood emerged before it began to clot rapidly. Within seconds, a fresh little scab had formed.

Fu Qinghai looked down at it all.

He understood now.

From this moment on,

he was no longer human.

He was an Astartes with two hearts and three lungs.

A precision-engineered War Machine. A carefully designed instrument of slaughter.

At that moment, aboard the Sword-class escort ship, inside the training cage,

Ogedei, his lower body gone, sat in a mechanical, round-platform wheelchair, gripping a heavy long blade in each hand and swinging them with all his might.

Weapons attacked him from every direction. Without his legs, he couldn't dodge or maneuver; all he could do was fend them off with his powerful arms and weapons.

"Clang, clang, bang, slash!"

Ogedei twisted rapidly using his waist and abdomen, his blades blurring as he blocked the weapons striking from every side.

Metal crashed against metal, sending bursts of sparks flying.

Suddenly, a metal spear thrust at him from behind and to his lower left. Ogedei couldn't dodge in time, and blood sprayed from his side.

"Argh!" He cried out. It sounded less like pain than anger.

Outside the training cage, Talal stood with his arms crossed, silently watching Ogedei inside.

Getting injured by the training cage was humiliating for any Astartes veteran who had seen years of battle.

Just then, a black mechanical skull floated into the training chamber.

It was a Servo-skull.

Red light flickered twice in its hollow eye sockets, and it spoke in a cold electronic voice:

"Lord Talal, Lord Ogedei, Master Kunto requests your presence in the laboratory."

Talal stopped the training cage and looked at Ogedei, who was drenched in sweat and breathing hard with his head lowered.

"Ogedei, guess what? That kid's probably out."

Still seething, Ogedei abruptly looked up, astonished. "He's already finished the transformation?"